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Pain: Lynsey's Story

This is an article that one of my friends, Lynsey, wrote for my site. She is an excellent writer and I appreciate her taking the time to write it. She has her own website: www.astepforward.co.uk Take a look at it when you have the chance! Now I will stop talking, it's Lynsey's turn.

Here's her story....

Pain has been a big part of just about all my life.

Up until I was about 11 years old, I had minor spasms from being a Cerebral Palsy sufferer and from 11 upwards, I have been in severe pain from Reflex Sympathetic Dystrophy. Although I had suffered with RSD from the age of 7, I had only experienced numbness or pins and needles, plus bad circulation and osteoporosis until I was 11, after then everything changed.

From 1995, pain was not a part of my life. It became my life. I slept, ate, worked, and played around what my body was doing to itself.

As a child, I danced and performed, I enjoyed reading and taking part in sports, despite always losing! But my teens have been a time of hospital stays, medication, and sleeping. In contrast, it was not the life I wanted or had planned for myself.

Pain leaves you emotionally drained and unless you live with it everyday, you can not really understand what it is like. Although through pain and illness, my social and home life have taken some good beatings and it has been extremely hard on everyone around me, but my education has taken the biggest bashing.

I left school in year 9 because of the pain I suffered was just too much and my body was slowly shutting down. I developed a sleeping disorder, where I would just fall asleep at a moment's notice, whether I was climbing stairs or taking a bath. People could not wake me, I was almost in and out of small comas.

Despite all of this, I did four GCSE exams that I passed and went to college for a year, but as I prepared for a further two year course in media, my body fought against my dreams and I could not take the course and this brings us to the present.

I am nearing the end of my teens and at almost 19 years old, I still find myself battling with the same old pain in the same old ways. As I enter adulthood, I feel that I should be out there with my life perfectly sorted with a career and a sparkling social life, but where is it?

So far, it is still in my head.

But although my life path has not been laid yet, I am more positive that I will beat the pain once and for all one day. I lost my teenage freedom, I do not plan to waste anymore.

Lynsey

"I find that life is 10% what happens to me and 90% how I react to it."

Charles Swindoll